Suuper's Cosplay Log

[Suuper-san]

6) Yes, although "famous" is a sleight outlier of a word. Famous to the fans of the show or famous in-world context? Perhaps "distinct" or "recognizable" might fit better.

Another red herring:
Some shoulder armour and details. This is completely my own addition. So in that sense, it's a clue :P





Some details are waiting to be Dremmelled, so it looks like there are some gaps between lines here and there.
The red and blue parts will be sprayed silver along with the whole thing, but I do like the primary colour contrast feel. Perhaps for another outfit sometime....

[Suuper-san]

Latest - shoulder and armguard painted with base colours. going to add some grime and weathering otherwise they look too plasticy..
Not quite as cool as I had hoped but to be honest I had no idea what I was aiming at so perhaps that caused some of that feeling.

Also still not a part of the original character so no clues there :P
Looks a tad cooler in real life than the photo.
Gotta paint the straps back to black cos I got spray on them by accident...forgot to mask them lol
Also they shouldn't even have been attached at that point but I got too excited early on and wanted to try it out :P



Also making my own strapping for other armor parts which are more visible (also partly original design)
Had to sew the black edging on to the white nylon (?) strap which was a nightmare. Quality very substandard but I'm not doing it again too much faff. Realsied 90% of the way through that a larger needle size would probably have helped with getting the stitching right, and it did indeed make the last bit of work more doable. The strapping is about as tough as denim which I didn't really think about since it was just like, "a thin strap". Ah, the things you learn...


Also apparently the cosplay day this coming week is gonna be a heatwave, so we all gonna die lol
I've just about got enough time to finish my stuff I think.
Ran out of black thread for my sewing machine of all things... gotta buy some tomorrow morning.

I'll post my sword soon which is a major clue , partly why I haven't posted any progress on that so far to make the guessing game a bit more fun :P

[Suuper-san]

well, my cosplay event has come and gone, and the time to reveal the full costume is here....
We all got a photoshoot session during the event, including some nice group shots, and some sword fight shots as well which were epic. Since it was all people I was friends (or friends of friends) with It was a massively super fun event. These are the best photos out of the poses I did.
All the armour pieces got a weathering coat to make them look more grimy, and it worked really well with my tattered leather jacket.
For a first-ever cosplay, I'm seriously proud of what I managed to achieve. I put the credit entirely on many hours of YouTube tutorials, and a tiny mix of my own existing craft skills.
Art skills came in handy for all the technical elements, I just free-handed/guessed a lot of the designs and they came out really cool looking first try.
Faces have been pixelized to protect the innocent XD





And just a front and back shot to shoff off all the pieces:




Was a super last minute rush to finish everything - I was literally painting the scabbard on the same day as the event, at 5am hoping the paint would dry before I travelled XD
A LOT of last minute adjustments and paint touches here and there to finish it off and I had to finally accept it was 100% complete.

A lot of individual straps to hold all the pieces on. If I've learned anything for the next costume, it's to use more elastic so I can just pop the costume on and let it adjust itself to my shape. There was a lot of strap tugging to get everything fitting nicely, but that was my decision because it felt more realistic, like you really felt like you were equipping up.
 
Overall went super well despite the quite hot day 32+/90+ depending on what currency you use XD
I endured the hot leather jacket for the sake of the character for several hours until I realized that the old (probably fake) leather was literally shedding EVERYWHERE. Had to take everything off, take off the jacket, and put it all back again, and just over a black T-shirt didn't look so bad either. I volunteered at the end to sweep the floor since there was literally leather tatters everywhere XD

Incidentally, I won "best men's costume" by popular vote, so that was a real nice (all the effort was worth it!!) moment.
 
I'll give you a final chance to guess who it is! I added and changed up quite a bit, but some parts are more truer to the original than others.

[Coryn]

Congrats suuper! It turned out really good!

So is it what's his putz from sword art? Main character man? Bob "Art of the Sword" Johnson?

[Suuper-san]

Thanks! for a first try I was pretty chuffed with how it turned out. Not much went wrong other than the timing of the making, which had me painting stuff 5am on the morning of the event and hoping it would dry in time for travelling with it XD

Your anime knowledge is simply astounding!!!

The original character base was indeed Kirito from SAO!

The more I finalized the design I realized that I didn't care much for the original design and made a lot of modifications, adding a lot of extra armor and making it a bit more edgy and darker than the original. So like an alter-Kirito, was the end result.

Not shown are the boots, which I put a lot of effort into, so here they are, with the importance of the weathering stage highlighted.
left:original, looking a bit too "plasticy" and clean.
right: with "weathering", basically adding grime by painting black into the crevices and rubbing it around with a cloth to make it look grimy.

[Coryn]

Ehehe, well it's no secret that I've never cared much for isekais.

No harm in a little redesign though. Those little touches and alterations add a lot to a cosplay. When there's 10 other Kiritios on the convention floor matching the artwork as perfectly as they can, one that's got some unique flavor will be a lot more interesting and garner more attention. Clearly, since you did win the contest, lol

As for the last minute stuff, that's a proud cosplay tradition or so I'm lead to believe by every serious cosplayer I've ever talked to, lol

[Suuper-san]

I hadn't thought of the design alterations in that way to be honest, that's a cool outlook.

Yeah i'd heard as much myself regarding deadlines lol. I think with any large project, there is a tendency to increase priority nearer the deadline, in proportion to the amount of work remaining as well. And often the amount of work estimated is always wrong (by a factor of two, even when taking that rule into account), so you start to get behind on your plans pretty much from the get go.
So it's almost inevitable ahahahaha